Sunday, February 23, 2014

In Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, a husband must put his wife into a residential
facility after 44 years together, when she starts to develop Alzheimer’s; she’s
initially too lucid for her new surroundings, but finds a way of adapting that
only seems to accelerate her decline, and widens the gulf between them, until
he sees the inevitability of things. Julie Christie is utterly luminous as
Fiona, conveying the jagged contours of her disintegrating consciousness so
precisely that it’s as if she were drawing a map; Gordon Pinsent as her husband
is almost as moving. The film is, by its nature, depressing, but in a way
that’s emotionally true and eloquent. It’s based on a short story by Alice
Munro, and always feels distinctly literary – living in usually snow-bound
isolation, the couple read poetry to each other and each scene is precisely
investigated and crafted. At times, given the ugliness of the disease and its
consequences, I found it a little too pristine - for example, we hardly sense
the full misery of the facility’s dreaded second floor, where patients are
moved after a certain stage of decline. In particular perhaps, the ending –
turning on what would have to be an incredibly wrenching, turbulent compromise,
overemphasizes structural tidiness, irony and perseverance. But it’s difficult
to blame a director as young and enterprising as Polley for retaining a certain
measure of idealism in this.

The Valet

At the other end of the directorial
spectrum, in so many senses, is Francis Veber, who turns 70 this year. Over the
years he’s perfected his M.O. – dreadful, garish comedies that seem lost in
time. The latest of these, The Valet,
is about a wealthy businessman who’s sleeping with a gorgeous supermodel; when
his wife gets suspicious, he pays a lowly parking valet to move in with his
girlfriend. No pesky nuances and shadings in Veber-land – each character is
allowed a couple of traits at the most, and a scene doesn’t so much lead into
the next as collapse into it. And Veber’s handling of actors resembles some
kind of perverse laboratory – on this occasion drawing out the worst-ever
performance from the great Daniel Auteuil. Like several other Veber movies,
it’ll probably be remade by Hollywood within a few years, and then it’ll be
even worse!

I may have had a bit of a crush on Adrienne
Shelly after her first two films, The
Unbelievable Truth and Trust,
both directed by Hal Hartley. Hartley seemed uniquely weird and promising at
the time, and Shelly was a spiky, accessible local goddess. Well, Hal Hartley
lost his inspiration in a big way – his new movie Fay Grim is a sad spectacle. And Adrienne Shelly is dead – murdered
in her building last November by a construction worker, reportedly after an
argument about keeping the noise down. She’d been barely visible for the last
fifteen years, taking lesser roles in lesser films. But she was working on
becoming a director, and when she died she’d just completed her first feature
film, Waitress. She also wrote it and
plays a supporting role (treating herself quite unflatteringly).

Waitress

This background makes an inherently quite
poignant film even more so; it’s surprisingly successful, and would no doubt
have opened up further possibilities for Shelly. Keri Russell plays a waitress
and ace baker of pies, stuck in a lousy marriage to a self-absorbed control
freak, secretly hoarding away money to plan her escape. She finds herself
pregnant, then falls in love with her gynecologist. Meanwhile, her two
colleagues at the diner tinker with their own lives.

Sounds pretty hokey, and I didn’t even
mention Andy Griffith, playing the owner of the diner, a curmudgeon with a
heart of, well, you know. The movie is studiedly mild – nothing in it bites as
much as it might have – but there’s a lot of grit and clear thinking baked in
there too. The movie focuses on the circumscribed choices of normal working
women, leading them to make decisions which even their best friends might view
as settling for less, or morally questionable; but when you’re stuck in the same
place with the same people, how much room for manoeuvre do you have? (no doubt
there’s something here of a transplanted metaphor for Shelly’s own experience).
The movie treats its men generously – even Jeremy Sisto’s portrayal of the
wretched husband is unusually subtle – while remaining resolute that this isn’t
their story. And the ending feels about right, if you can look past the tragic
fact that the two-year old girl in the last scene is played by Shelly’s own
daughter. Her ending was too freakish to constitute much of an emblem for the
continuing challenges of women, and yet the echoes are awfully unsettling.

Spider-Man 3

It’s hard to write a review of Spider-Man 3 that doesn’t simply recycle
dozens of past reviews of underwhelming Hollywood blockbusters – the movie
doesn’t even have the panache to fail with any great distinction. At least it’s
not one of those mechanical, cold creations where you doze from one explosion
to the next; in fact the film’s greater failing is that it’s so determined to continue
the emphasis of its two predecessors on Peter Parker’s character, on the
emotional contours of being Spiderman. In practice though this only means that
we go through yet another round with his girlfriend, his former best friend who
now hates him, his wise old aunt, and his ever-present obsession with the death
of his wise old uncle, all without generating anything new. The set-up of the
villains is laboured, and here too the movie seems to be suffering from an
imagination deficit. And finally, it’s yet another big-budget movie that pushes
digital technology into the realm of counter-productivity – the sense of
artificiality is pervasive, if only because it’s so clear how none of the
actors are sweating, or suffering, or straining (it’s largely the commitment to
these qualities that made Casino Royale
so relatively effective). Naturally, it enjoyed the biggest opening weekend of
all time.

Jindabyne, directed by Ray Lawrence, is an intriguing Australian drama,
treating some familiar family dynamics very deftly, and then ventilating the
film’s texture with a highly specific sense of place. It’s a small, mostly
barren looking New South Wales town, built on the haunting shores of a former
settlement that’s now submerged beneath a lake. It’s initially odd that the
film’s main focus is a couple played by Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, neither
attempting Australian accents, but their obvious (largely unexplained)
otherness generates some useful resonances. Byrne’s character goes away with
some buddies on a weekend fishing trip; they find a dead body floating in a
river, but keep fishing for a few days before reporting it; when this comes
out, the men are pilloried in their community, and the couple’s fragile
marriage almost collapses. The film weaves a very diverse tapestry, and might
have generated greater overall complexity and after-effect with less tidy
resolutions to some of its strands, but it’s alluringly dense with instability,
foreboding and danger.

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty
is the favourite to win this year’s foreign language film Oscar, and as many
have mentioned, such an award would be a happy throwback to the days when the
mega-auteur Fellini was a frequent contender and winner (he took it home four
times). The film places us in the world of Jep Gambardella, a journalist and
long-ago novelist who lives in the heart of Rome (in a gorgeous apartment
overlooking the Colosseum), even in his mid-sixties still getting up in the
afternoon and partying until dawn (it’s unclear how he funds his lifestyle, as
he seems to work very little). It’s a dazzling life, filled with heightened
experiences and encounters, and an abundance of sex, in one of the world’s most
privileged and overwhelming settings; at the same time, it’s the same places,
same people, same variations on what he’s been doing for decades, while the
possibilities for greater achievements fall away.

The Great Beauty

There’s a lot of death in the film, literally and figuratively, but then
there’s a lot of everything in it –
it runs nearly two and a half hours (and on this occasion it’s hard to leave
during the closing credits too), and it would take nearly that long to
disentangle everything Sorrentino crams in there. Sometimes, he embraces the
whip-cracking ringmaster tradition, opening up the city’s secret places,
orchestrating frenzied parties with copious side orders of debauchery, plopping
down giraffes and flamingoes, staging absurd conceptual art pieces, and
peppering his cast with extremely short or extremely old people, or befuddled
representatives of the cloth. At several points, Jep evokes the concept of
writing a novel about nothing, whereby Sorrentino tempts the audience to label
his film as such while actually making it a richer and more tangible something than any other work you’re
likely to encounter.

But, as in Fellini films like La
Strada and 8 ½, there’s also the
gorgeously outfitted boredom of it all, the existential angst, pivoting here on
the magnificently resonant actor Toni Servillo, with his inherent ability to
project depths and unexpressed calculations. The character is an unashamed
artificiality – I can imagine lots of people watching the film and finding no
way into it, and Sorrentino virtually dares us to judge him an elitist, even
condescending filmmaker. At one point, Jep visits the widowed husband of an old
girlfriend, finding him now happy with a new woman (pointedly depicted as the
kind of woman Jep himself never encounters), with no plans for the evening
other than to iron, have a glass of wine and watch TV. With measured
passive-aggressiveness (there’s a lot of that in the film too) Jep describes
how in contrast he’ll be spending the night in controlled revellment, going to
bed when they’re getting up. It’s the contrast between a large, visible life
and a small one, but begging the question of which best serves underlying needs
(Jep’s only there in the first place because of unresolved anxiety about the
dead woman). One of Jep’s friends, one of the sadder characters in recent
cinema, ends up essentially writing off forty years of his life in Rome as a
misconceived disappointment.

The Great Trick

Time and again in The Great Beauty,
Sorrentino arrives at something that might be the thematic or emotional high
point of a lesser film, only to move on. He presents the death of one major
character so subtly, almost subliminally, that you might literally blink and
miss it; the film teems with glimpses down other roads it might have followed.
After a couple of hours or so, I actually thought it was over, only to have it
crank up again with one of its most brilliant sustained strands, involving a
visiting Mother Theresa-type and the surrounding hoopla (the actual ending,
when it arrives, is satisfying, but doesn’t by any means embody classic
narrative closure). The film shows up the claustrophobic calculations of a film
like Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, which
I wrote about last week; Sorrentino elevates every scene with some elegance of
camera movement or dialogue, or human mystery. Of course, it’s a performance
(“a trick,” in the words of the film), as much as that of the magician who says
he’ll make the giraffe disappear. There’s not enough room in the cultural world
for that many films like this. Maybe it’s a miracle there’s even enough room
for one.

Sorrentino’s auteur status, insofar as such a thing is available now, has
been steadily building for a decade. He’s probably previously best known in
this country for his 2008 Il Divo, a
study of Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. It’s not the best
introduction to him though, at least not for those who,
like me, have only a vague knowledge of post-war Italian politics (as in, it’s
really dysfunctional, and a lot of people got blown up) – even the opening
explanatory screen-scroll is barely penetrable. Still, it’s an interesting,
silkily menacing portrait of advanced inscrutability (we see Andreotti rip a
page out of a mystery novel because he doesn’t want to know the killer). A
better starting point might be his earlier The
Consequences of Love, possibly the least likely film one can imagine having
that title. Yet another portrait of a human enigma (both this and Il Divo also starred Servillo), it seems
for a long while like a collection of elements that can’t possibly be
explained, until Sorrentino immaculately does exactly that (albeit with some
recourse to melodramatic extremity).

This Must be the Place

More recently, he
made the English language This Must be
the Place, starring Sean Penn as a reclusive rock singer living in Ireland,
who embarks on a very strange trip across America. The film was barely seen
here, but it’s another fascinating exercise in creating a character and
situation lying outside any familiar reference point, while somehow remaining
coherent. Views might differ on how well Sorrentino succeeded on the latter
point, but it’s a fascinating performance by actor and director alike (it seems
right here to apply the term to both): the title speaks to a desire for
anchoring and closure, but the film itself is a constant exercise in
displacement and in the fusion of extremes. Characteristically of Sorrentino’s
work, I could attempt to describe it here in great detail while still failing
entirely to convey what you should actually expect to see.

In the end, The Great Beauty may be at its core an
elevated expression of the same human mess we’ve seen many times before – it
has some similarities to Wolf of Wall
Street for instance. But the magic is in the elevation.

Monday, February 17, 2014

While I was running off my film festival
articles, it feels like a thousand movies came and went, and the one I heard
about from most people was (of all things) What
the Bleep do we Know. Based on a flashily off-putting trailer and mediocre
reviews, I’d initially decided to give it a pass. But then people kept
mentioning it to me - my friend Irene even saw it three times. So I went too.

What the Bleep...

The film is notionally about quantum
physics but actually has about as much hard science as an old episode of Star Trek – it merely establishes a
general notion of all things being connected, then extrapolates this into a
rambling meditation on the power of positive thinking (suggested daily
affirmation: “I’m taking this time to create my day and I’m affecting my
quantum field.”) Interviews with scientists and commentators intertwine with
lots of computer-generated gimmickry and a bizarre narrative with Marlee Matlin
as a preoccupied photographer, whose personal regeneration illustrates the
film’s themes. Judged as documentary, the film seems completely woolly. But I
have to admit it caught me at a moment when I was predisposed to its thesis, so
I basically lapped it up.

It’s surprisingly outspoken in its
denunciation of organized religion – given its premise of individual
possibility, it dismisses the image of a controlling God as the “height of
arrogance” on the part of those who perpetrate this image. Which confirms this
as a liberal “blue state” movie. A brief aside at this point. Since I was
writing about film festival movies through November, I wasn’t tempted to
digress onto the US election. Whatever I might have said, it wouldn’t have been
pretty. But now, with two months’ buffer, I’ll just quote What the Bleep: “The real trick to life is not to be in the know,
but to be in the mystery.” I think Bush’s victory might have succeeded in
putting all of us there.

Fall Documentaries

At the other end of the documentary
spectrum, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s The
Take zoomed in on a small beacon of progressivity in Argentina, where
worker collectives are taking back control of factories brought to their knees
by Carlos Menem’s reckless free-market policies. It’s a shame the movie
couldn’t have provided a bit more context, but it was good reporting, missing
Michael Moore’s agitprop exuberance and the analytical edge of The Corporation, but also lacking the
occasional pretensions of both. Lurking as the villain in the film’s background
was the International Monetary Fund, an organization that came in for further
bashing in the one-of-a-kind The Yes Men.
This follows a couple of guys who carry out a sort of global performance art,
wrangling speech and TV invitations in the guise of IMF representatives, and
then delivering monstrous pronouncements with a straight-faced reasonability
that reels in their audiences. I also went to Team America: World Police in the hope of further pointed political
satire, but came away severely disappointed.

The fall had its usual quota of feel good
movies, and I’ll confess to getting distinctly teary at the death of Tinkerbell
(presaging that of Kate Winslet) in Finding
Neverland. On the whole the film was distinctly familiar, albeit pleasant,
boosted by yet another remarkable Johnny Depp performance. Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason had to strenuously break the
happy ending established at the end of the first movie before equally
strenuously reinstating it, but Renee Zellweger’s dedication (however
misplaced) gave it more verisimilitude than it deserved. Shall we Dance had little reason for existing, and the remake of Alfie even less than that.

I didn't like The Motorcycle Diaries as much as most reviewers – it was pictorial
and gently intriguing but the character of Che Guevara was utterly idealized,
and the film’s frail attempts to signal his future development seemed
pasted-on. Another overpraised film, Enduring
Love, seemed to me no more than standard stalker-slasher stuff with a
pretentious coating of gush.

Friday
Night Lights was quite a bit more intriguing. I saw
it in a mall in Calgary, where the movie’s painstaking excavation of a small
football-obsessed town seemed (to these unschooled Eastern eyes) to carry
mysterious resonance. Birth was an
accomplished but ultimately minor exercise in style over content. Saw was bewildering and off-putting.

The fall’s big epic, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, was a real mixed bag. There’s
an intriguing 90-minute picture buried in there, carrying considerable
contemporary resonance, about a radical imperialist ambition. Unfortunately, what
with all the padding, the film lasts twice that long, and much of it is dire.
Like Martin Scorsese with Gangs of New
York, it feels as if the film’s logistical demands simply defeated Stone’s
energy and ability to control the material.

The season’s biggest hit, The Incredibles, impressed me for its
visuals and for its surprising subtlety, although I found the plot itself
somewhat tedious. As no particular fan of animation, I didn’t yield to the
movie as completely as I did to The
Triplets of Belleville or Spirited
Away. I have to confess that I didn’t see The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.

The Season’s Best

Best of all, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake. It may be slightly less
philosophically exhilarating than his Topsy-Turvy,
but otherwise stands at the peak of his amazing body of work. The film’s first
hour, with amazing fluency and almost supernatural attention to time and place,
sketches a cross section of activities and encounters that fully convey the
limited parameters of 1920’s working-class Britain, revolving around a housewife
who among a plethora of good deeds “helps out girls in trouble” – she performs
abortions for them. When the police apprehend her, her world collapses – she
becomes all but catatonic, and we see how fragile is the definition of a woman
in such limited environs.

The film is a remarkable depiction of
sexuality. Vera, despite her transgressive behaviour, seems effectively
sexless, and every character around her represents a slightly different
perspective on sex and its conditioning by class. It’s unspeakably sad and
remarkably contoured; once in a while, looking at some of Leigh’s sad sack
characters, you can see why some detect a note of condescension in his
approach, but who else immerses himself in this world with such tenacity?

All that, as well as a great season of
Maurice Pialat movies and the extended The
Big Red One and Queimada at the
Cinematheque, and the John Cassavetes DVD boxed set to watch at home. And I
didn’t see National Treasure, The Polar
Express and dozens of others. So that’s the fall season taken care of...and
now on to winter...

Saturday, February 15, 2014

France has always been a lighthouse to foreign filmmakers looking for
different shores. Of course, any number of American directors have found their
way there, to Paris in particular, but there’s also an intriguing if somewhat
cautionary list of one-off French films made by non-Westerners. Twenty-five
years ago, Nagisa Oshima made Max mon
amour, about a diplomat’s wife in love with a chimp; no one liked the film,
and he achieved little thereafter. More recently, Iranian Abbas Kiarostami made
the rather academic Certified Copy
before moving on to Japan and the scintillating Like Someone in Love. In 2007, the gorgeous Flight of the Red Balloon seemed to mark a new direction for the
Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-Hsien, but he hasn’t managed to release a film since then.
Of course, it’s fanciful to extract any impression from such a light sample,
but it suggests it’s not so easy to transform oneself into a French filmmaker,
to channel that classic allure without losing something of your creative soul.
This wouldn’t be out of step with what people say about France in general –
there’s a whole mini literary category of bemused memoirs by outsiders who’ve
tried to break the societal code.

The Past

Asghar Farhadi’s The Past is a
highly assured addition to the category, perhaps reflecting that the Iranian director
has spent extended periods of time in the city. It starts as Ahmad (Ali
Mosaffa) arrives there from his home in Tehran, to finalize his divorce from
his French wife Marie (Berenice Bejo). She’s now living with Sahir, and
expecting a child by him (she also has two from the man she married before
Ahmad); he’s also married, but his wife is in a coma, non-responsive, after a
suicide attempt some months previously. The film could best be summed up as a
series of questions, only some of which are ultimately answered. What are
Marie’s real feelings for Sahir (their relationship seems fraught, and her
teenage daughter Lucie claims his primary appeal to her is simply in looking
somewhat like Ahmad)? What did Sahir’s wife know about the relationship he and
Marie were having behind her back, and how much did it push her to do what she
did? More broadly, what’s the viability of such a messy family unit, with bonds
and living arrangements perpetually shifting, and ongoing ties with previous
partners perpetually getting in the way of present ones?

Farhadi won the best foreign film Oscar for his previous film A Separation, which he made in Iran. When
I wrote about the film here, I cited how Sight
and Sound (in a typical assessment) called it “a
film that pays us the compliment of letting us make up our own minds,” and I
added: “I find this more persuasive in some senses than others. To the extent
that we have to make up our own minds about the facts of the depicted events,
it’s largely just the result of a cinematic contrivance, not inherently more
sophisticated than any he said/she said police procedural.” Warming to the
theme, I added: “I don’t know if being allowed to ‘make up our own minds’ is
really such a big deal. I mean, we spend a big chunk of our lives making up our
own minds, not necessarily with such stellar results. I think we could use more
artists who are actually out to change
our minds, and who are passionate about it.”

Old-style art-house

Much the same kind
of praise and counter-praise might be directed at The Past, although it’s not attracting a fraction of the attention its
predecessor did (Bejo did win the best actress award at last year’s Cannes
festival though). But in a way, the new film’s smaller canvas and relative
artistic modesty make the criticism less compelling. The Past is an old-style art-house film, a work that feels
calculated more than felt, designed for audiences with a penchant for sinking
into extended conversations and anguish and the kinds of ambiguities I
mentioned (and, as a not un-meaningful aside, a tolerance for a film where a
pregnant woman smokes frequently, with the fact barely remarked on by others).
It’s most distinguished by Farhadi’s eye for small details and elaborations.
This isn’t the Paris of Breathless
and Funny Face, but that of the
margins, of the daily grind (in an interview, Farhadi said: “The pitfall for
filmmakers working in an unknown setting is to highlight in the film the first
things that catch their eye. I tried to do the opposite.”). Much of the film is
set in Marie’s house, a superbly envisaged, rickety structure where everything
is either actively falling apart or else needs work, heavy with memories and
traces. It’s strongly cast too: Mosaffa has a patiently searching affect to him
that inherently expands almost everything he does or says, and Bejo’s beauty
seems authentically strained here in a way that her best known role, in The Artist, kept artificially masked.

I also thought of a French film that goes in
the opposite direction to the one I mentioned – Agnes Varda’s 1977 One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, a
chronicle of two decades or so in the life of two women. One of them falls in
love with an Iranian man and visits there with him, later getting married and
staying on; the looseness he displayed in France starts to fall away, showing
him as another perpetrator of the patriarchy, and she ends up leaving him. It’s
a strength of sorts that Farhadi – even given all the present-day neurosis
about Iran’s place in the world – doesn’t come close to such territory: there’s
no suggestion that such issues played any part in Marie and Ahmad’s break-up
(unless I missed something, we never even know what Ahmad does for a living).

Not just anywhere

But at the same time, it emphasizes the
artificiality of his construct. Perhaps somewhat contradicting the remarks I
quoted about avoiding an obvious take on Paris, he said in the same interview:
“When you want to tell a story dealing with the past, you need to set it in a
city like Paris that exudes the past. This story couldn’t have taken place just
anywhere.” But you could easily argue that any human story built on a certain
amount of structural and sexual messiness “deals with the past” even as it
deals with the present and future, and if this one couldn’t have taken place
elsewhere, that seems to say more about Farhadi’s abstract conception of it
than about the inherent benefits of the city’s skeleton-channelling qualities.
After all, Paris, and France in general, have a whole lot of economic problems,
increasingly resembling a super-charged version of everyone else’s, and its societal
focus on the past is a big part of why it never gets anywhere in solving them.
At some point, the country, like the director, will have to find a way of
moving on.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Quite a few of the highly positive reviews
for Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker
come across as expressions of relief. Take Roger Ebert, who calls it: “a film
shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what
they're doing and why. The camera work is at the service of the story. Bigelow
knows that you can't build suspense with shots lasting one or two seconds.”
Now, on its own terms, this seems rather strange doesn’t it? What’s so amazing
about filming things clearly – isn’t that kind of, you know, basic? Whoever
said you could build suspense with
one or two second shots?

The Hurt Locker

Now, he doesn’t mention Transformers 2 in there, having thrown
it a brief one-star dismissal elsewhere, but that film really rubbed critics up
the wrong way. They almost all thought it was long and boring and stupid and
poorly made, and they told the world so, and then it became a mega-hit anyway.
If you were a salesman, and customers kept spitting in your face, you’d probably
go and sell something else; film critics don’t have that kind of mobility, so
they just sit there and seethe (since I occupy a more enviable niche as far as
film reviewing goes at least, I just didn’t see Transformers 2, and thus need have no angst about it.)

The Hurt Locker isn’t quite a way of
sending the spit back, but it’s been brandished at least as a suitably eloquent
retort. It actually screened originally at last year’s Toronto festival, almost
a year ago, and was well enough received, but not in a way that separated it
from the pack. Cut to ten months later and it’s greeted as the answer to all
our problems. This is probably just more proof of how quickly the world is
getting worse.

The movie is set in Iraq, focusing on a
bomb defusing unit; the leader is blown up in the film’s first scene, and we
focus from there on his replacement, Sgt James, played by Jeremy Renner. The
opening quotation tells us “war is a drug,” and after over eight hundred
successful missions, James has become somewhat dislodged from the normal
procedures and protections, disregarding convention in a way that might be
foolhardy, might be his only remaining way of feeling alive, might evidence the
extent of his honed intuition, or all of the above. There’s not much analysis
or “bigger picture” in the film: one mission follows the next, each life
threatening by definition, each testing soul and stamina in its own way.

It’s certainly gripping viewing, and it’s
not that I disagree with the rapturous reviews as such; it’s just that I’d
grade the achievement inherently a little lower. As I suggested, I’m not sure
others wouldn’t too, if mainstream Hollywood movies were inherently better. The
action sequences are marvelously done, but hardly revelatory, and James’ form
of addiction to the “drug” certainly fits comfortably with a long history of
taciturn movie mavericks. As presented, actually, the drug isn’t war as such,
but more its capacity for allowing extreme personalities to craft themselves a
suitably stylized persona: watching James do his stuff, usually watched from
doorways and windows and rooftops by numerous local civilian spectators
(sometimes likely including the people who planted the bombs in the first
place), the term “theater of war” comes to mind. Popular culture responds with
gusto to such displays – why, for example, is the highly implausible Kilgore
(“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”) the best-remembered element of Apocalypse Now? But these displays
surely take place in war’s colourful margins, rather than its degrading,
deadening heart.

Bruno

Bruno,
starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a gay nincompoop out
to attain celebrity, is actually a more stimulating movie to me than The Hurt Locker, in the sense of leaving
more to think about afterwards, and greater uncertainty about what it all
amounts to. Peter Travers in Rolling
Stone says the film is “Swiftian — crude,
profane, fearless in using ridicule to bite hypocrisy on the ass.” Mick LaSalle
in the San Francisco Chronicle
counters: “Cohen's strategy is to make
audiences laugh at homosexuality itself, or perhaps at his outrageous lampoon
of homosexuality - and then think less of the unsuspecting people who take his
act at face value..(but it) can't succeed as satire, because it has no moral
grounding or honest point of view.” Nearly everyone who’s written about the
film seems to evaluate it slightly differently, which may in fact be its
primary achievement. Oh, plus that it’s as funny as hell in places.I’m more on the LaSalle side of the spectrum. The film
deserves points for sheer pace and variety – Bruno’s project takes him from
Hollywood to the Middle East, from swingers to preachers, from politicians to
cage fights, and as in Cohen’s Borat
(directed like this one by Larry Charles), many of the set-ups use real (and
presumably unsuspecting) people, manipulated by Cohen usually into either
meltdowns or incoherence. These generally involve Cohen flouting all accepted
standards of behaviour, or private space or social convention, for example
getting himself into a private situation with a straight guy and then starting
to take his clothes off; whatever messy, spontaneous reaction the other might
have to that, I’m not sure it’s fair to label the set-up as “biting hypocrisy
on the ass.”

Actually, a lot of people either get the
joke and play along or else demonstrate a sometimes-admirable pragmatism
(sometimes it’s almost poignant, suggesting people are just trying in their
unsophisticated ways to keep going). But however you score the individual
scenes, it’s hard not to think the whole enterprise is conducted – again – in
the margins of things. There’s nothing here about mainstream industry or
business, nothing that’s relevant to the core question of what discrimination
gay people trying to live an honest and equal life might suffer. But then, I
just don’t think the movie’s about that. To be honest with you, I don’t really
think it’s about anything: it’s like a lowbrow conceptual performance art
creation, cleverly designed to facilitate opposing readings, and thus (perhaps)
to illustrate what a crock these readings all are. Certainly you feel the
audience reaction is as much part of the show as anything on the screen – the
whole thing has a loose-leaf kind of feeling, as if inviting annotation. But if
it is about anything, then it’s about
how a really talented and largely fearless straight guy can rake in laughs from
behaving like a moronic, sex-obsessed homosexual. Almost Swiftian, no question.

In the most recent issue of Cineaste
magazine, Dina Iordanova writes about how the Internet has changed the world
for lovers and students of classic films. She notes: “we now deal with a
profoundly transformed landscape of availability for rare cinematic texts, an
environment that has never existed before, not even a year ago, and that is
getting richer by the day, evolving in an extraordinarily accelerated manner
through both paid and free channels.” She observes that whereas it was probably
only plausible to study the full range of cinema in the past by living in a
major city, it can now be done from anywhere (Iordanova herself says she lives
“in a remote Scottish fishing village”). The abundance and opportunity is
thrilling, but not without caveats: the online material is often chaotic, disappearing
as quickly as it appeared, and this aspect of the Internet calls out for
greater curation and guidance for the uninitiated. Still, she concludes, “the
future holds more promise than our present hopes and imaginings can foretell.”

Plugging holes

I know entirely what she means – in the last few years, I’ve plugged most
of the holes in my mental list of films I wanted to see, some of which had been
there for thirty years. A film like Josef von Sternberg’s 1953 Anatahan – which I cite more or less at
random just because it’s the most recent thing I found on there – isn’t
available on DVD and never shows up on TV; to my knowledge, it hasn’t played at
the Bell Lightbox or its predecessor during the last twenty years (although of
course there’s always the chance of overlooking some stray screening, which
sort of underlines the point). To all practical purposes, for “normal” people
with no privileged connections, Anatahan
has been a lost film. I’d tried in the past to download it from online, but for
some reason it froze at 87% (an example of the recurring bumps in the road of
access). But when I tried again the other week, it downloaded within a few
hours, and I watched it the next day. No matter how many times I experience
things like this, it still seems like an unimaginable wonder.

Iordanova specifically excludes considerations of copyright and
remuneration from her article. I’ve generally tried to download things only
when there seems to be no way of paying for them even if I wanted to (although
my record in this respect isn’t perfect). YouTube poses a problem because as a
huge visible archive operated by a major corporation, it seems reasonable to
assume as a base premise that one isn’t abetting illegal activity by accessing whatever
you find on there. I proceeded on this basis for a while, absorbing all sorts
of rare treasures. But a few months ago, when I came to the end of Georges
Franju’s Thomas the Impostor, I got a
message saying the film – and other wonderful material posted by the same
source -had been removed due to
repeated complaints by copyright holders. Counting myself lucky that the
removal had happened in such a way that I’d still been able to see the end, I
assumed that was that.

Keeping it legal

But I’ve subsequently noticed that the film, and the rest of the related archive,
turned up on YouTube again, so I guess it’s not easy to thwart a determined
apostle of art cinema. It’s usually impossible to know then whether films like
this are there “legally” or not, and even when it seems they’re not, is the
virtue of staying away always clear? Put another way, should we respect the
rights of the legal owner of an inaccessible film such as Thomas, if the owner’s only plan for it is seemingly to keep the film
from ever being seen?

Trying to keep things legal can be wearying. I subscribe to Mubi.com, which
offers a rotating selection of thirty mostly somewhat obscure films at any one
time. I was excited that one of these, recently, was the Korean film Oasis, until it transpired that the film
came only with Norwegian subtitles, an unbelievable idiocy for a service being
marketed in Canada. This then raised a further moral question – would I be
justified in downloading a useable version of Oasis, since I’d sort of paid for it already? Similar questions
arise in my mind when I try to PVR something that’s on cable (for which I pay
for many, many channels), and the recording doesn’t work, usually because the
Rogers Nextbox often seems to reboot around 3 am on Tuesday morning. To me,
such questions are considerably greyer than the ethics of downloading, say, the
current Hollywood blockbuster, which I don’t see any justification for at all.
But I guess I wouldn’t raise the issue unless I had some doubts.

Still, this is all just to say it’s a work in progress, and incidental to
the main point, which as Iordonova describes is simply the immense richness of
what’s available. Time and time again, I find myself thinking back to my
teenage years, when I’d read about magical-sounding directors like Bunuel or
Ozu, with no immediate hope of seeing anything they’d made. This had its
positive aspects of course – when I did somehow manage to view even one of
their films, it was a supremely exciting event. It’s also true, no doubt, that
billionaires can find reasons to speak warmly of the years they spent cold and
hungry. It’s a continuing amazement to me that, decades later, I have fifteen
Ozu films on my shelf now; several others are on YouTube as I write, and
several others again can be located elsewhere.

Shifting constraints

So the constraint has dramatically shifted, from access to time and
capacity. More and more, I deal with this regressively, by playing within my
teenage wishlist, ticking off unseen works and revisiting core ones. I know
this limits the time I might spend opening up new frontiers, but at least it’s
a somewhat informed choice; others would and should make it differently. If I were
a teenager now, given how much more sprawling the body of great work is now
compared to thirty years ago, I don’t think I’d know where to start. (In the
Lightbox bookstore recently I saw a book seemingly intended to help with this
problem, titled 1001 Movies You Must See before
You Die, but as the cover consisted of a still from Life of Pi, and my random opening of it landed on The Muppet Movie, it may be most
effective at enhancing the relative appeal of death).

Obviously, no one with access to a modem should ever have to complain again
about having nothing to watch. But that’s a paltry way of expressing the
richness of the opportunity available to us. Without ever leaving our remote
fishing village or equivalent, we can be educated and stimulated and thrilled
and nurtured beyond all measure. The challenges I’ve noted will presumably
dwindle with time, but the gift will endure forever.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Agnes Jaoui’s film The Taste of Others was one of my favourite releases of 2001. The film always stays in familiar, easily
assimilated territory, juggling various stories of relationships; it’s often
funny and ironic in a pretty straightforward way, it’s unobtrusive in its style
and acted in a pleasant register. Yet I found it as scintillating as the best
recent work by Alain Resnais or Andre Techine. The title has a double meaning,
incorporating both a subject and an object, and the film wholly realizes this
duality as it examines in surprising detail a range of shifting tastes and
possibilities.

Look at Me

Jaoui’ follow-up film Comme une image (Look at Me) won the award for best screenplay at
last year’s Cannes festival. Like The
Taste of Others, Jaoui co-wrote it with her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri, and
they both also act in it. Bacri plays a famous, acerbic author and publisher,
living with a much younger wife and small daughter, maintaining a fractious
relationship with his grown daughter by his first wife. That daughter (played
by Marylou Berry) is training to be a classical singer, and (not incidentally
to her relationship with her father and others) is on the heavy side. Jaoui
plays her singing coach, whose husband is also an author; in the course of the
film he goes from struggling to successful, and becomes ensconced in Bacri’s
entourage. This group also includes a man whose precise function is unclear
(even to those in the film), but whose even-keeled, mostly sycophantic
counterpoint to Bacri’s moods provides some of the film’s best laughs and (in
one astute close-up) its most delicate poignancy.

Bacri‘s character is functionally a
monster, and the film’s rough measure of its other characters’ spiritual health
lies in the distance they manage to put between themselves and him. But the
film understands that such monsters are created as much by the structures
around them as by rampant pathology; the title (Jaoui and her translators are a
whiz with titles) suggests how identity is as much social as personal. The
characters are articulate enough in explaining themselves, but these explanations
don’t necessarily bear much relationship to what they’ll actually do, or why.

Jaoui’s interest in the gulf between
interior and exterior lives lends itself well to a milieu in which most of the
characters are artists of one kind or another. Someone says that a book of
Bacri’s has “humanity and conscience,” although the man himself seems far from
those qualities. He suggests that his daughter’s devotion to singing is merely
that of a dilettante, an opinion that appears at least plausible for much of
the film. Jaoui’s husband, at the height of his theme, appears on a gloriously
tacky TV show which despite the host’s stated admiration of his work seems
implicitly to mock the very notion of an inner life.

Renewal and Revision

This all gives the film a pervasive
existential doubt: when one character says of something that “it’s no big
deal,” the response is “no, nothing is.” But this doesn’t negate their vividness,
or their alertness to possibilities of renewal and revision. There’s a
beguiling moment where Jaoui’s character goes to a party and falls under the
intent gaze of a younger man. We see them dancing together, but nothing more.
Who knows what was said, what might have transpired? Likewise, an underwear
model and flagrant object of desire haunts the film’s fringes and appears in person
near the end; Bacri habitually remarks on the attractions of various women; and
even the insecure Berry character has two (sort of) boyfriends. These alternate
possibilities show up the ambiguity of prevailing arrangements. It’s utterly
unclear, for instance, what Bacri’s young wife sees in him (he quotes her as
saying that his face terrifies her). She leaves for a while, but returns. This
all leads to a finale that pulls off the expected balancing act, allowing a
sense of resolution while giving no ground on anything that’s gone before, and
allowing considerable remaining ambiguity.

In this brief space I’m merely picking out
some of the patterns and themes that struck me,and sometimes I wonder if Jaoui isn’t working in a sort of high-toned
semi-freeform style, out of which certain shapes fall as they will. She seems
like the most reticent of directors, so it’s hard to say.The
Taste of Others created such high expectations for her next film that Comme une image can’t possibly carry the
same element of surprise, and this is perhaps the reason why the earlier work
remains slightly higher in my memory. But Comme
une image is certainly one of the year’s most pleasurable viewing
experiences so far. Sadly, I’ve been reading that Jaoui and Bacri have now
broken up, so it will be interesting to see how this affects her artistic
equilibrium.

Sin City

Sin
City lies at the opposite end of the filmmaking spectrum.
This is based on a comic book by Frank Miller, whose fidelity to his vision is
such that he apparently rebuffed more than ten previous attempts to film his
work. Robert Rodriguez (director of El
Mariachi and Once Upon a Time in
Mexico) won him over, and even gives Miller a co-director credit. So I
guess we know we are watching Miller’s true vision. It’s narrow and sordid,
with hardboiled men and mostly slutty women strutting round in violent but
vaguely idealistic circles against a corrupt background. It’s a world that’s
mostly recognizable as our own, but with considerable elasticity at the edges –
the darker emotions are magnified, and the laws of nature a bit more pliable.

The film has three main plot lines,
starring Mickey Rourke , Clive Owen and Bruce Willis. All three stories are
extremely similar – hard-boiled, fatalistic tales of personal exertion (the
details are often gruesome, but it practices a certain restraint in the
depiction). The film looks pretty good – shot mostly in pristine black and
white with the occasional careful insertion of colour – and technically it’s just
about immaculate, but the general monotony and lack of true inspiration or
purpose prevent it from generating much substantial interest; it’s just
inherently second rate. The rather amazing cast also includes Benicio del Toro,
Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson and Jessica Alba – Miller’s conceptions of the
men are simplistic enough, but seem quite nuanced next to those of the women.
On the whole, it’s less interesting to watch Sin City than it is to daydream (illogically, I admit, but not
unprofitably) about what Agnes Jaoui would make of it.

In Donald Cammell’s 1977 film Demon Seed, a super-computer rejects its creator’s plan of having
it work on governmental and corporate challenges, and focuses instead on the
scientist’s wife (Julie Christie), imprisoning her in her house and figuring
out a way to impregnate her, to thereby give itself a physical form. The movie
is probably more interesting now than it was at the time – lots of it is
overdone, but it’s often very scrupulous in its physical imaginings, and
Cammell searches for ways to express the machine’s expanding consciousness. We
now know however that if computers are
a threat to our social and sexual structures as we’ve known them, the threat lies
less in big centralized edifices, and more in little devices in our pockets. Although
you could see the fertilization-by-computer notion as a displaced prediction of
that.

Her

Spike Jonze’s Her
might be seen as a contemporary response to Cammell’s film – we’re all now well
and truly knocked up, but we’re not yet sure what we’re giving birth to, or how
much we care. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a recently separated man living
in a Los Angeles of the near future (partly represented by Shanghai for the
film’s purposes), much more like our present day than not: urban density seems to
have gone on increasing, fashions have generally regressed (really ugly pants)
and of course technology keeps pushing forward. He purchases a new operating
system with advanced capacities to tailor itself to the user; in his case, it
speaks with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, and provides much better
conversation than most real-life women – after a while, it also becomes
interested in sex (first the phone kind, and then in more creative ways of
surmounting the physical problems). He becomes comfortable with telling people
he’s dating his operating system, which by then isn’t such an isolated
condition anyway.

The film is up for the best picture Oscar and won awards
from various critics group, and it plainly taps into some recurring
contemporary concerns. It feels like you hardly go a day without running into
another article about putting appropriate boundaries around the time one spends
in the digital world, or the dangers of becoming more comfortable with texting
people than actually talking to them, etc. etc. I don’t think there’s any doubt
that many of the theoretical benefits of the web and everything that flows from
it have comprehensively failed to materialize: we may have unparalleled access
to our collective cultural heritage, if we look for it, but the prevailing
conversations in the media and life generally could hardly be more uniformly
dumb. Of course, it’s possible to be all pious and retrograde about this:
people only have one life, and it’s not easy to make it work, and who cares
what kind of crutches you rely on? But at the same time, there seems to be a
surge in generalized anxiety, in financial strain, in a sense that things used
to be better, that we just keep dancing faster and faster when deep down we
really want to stop the music and get off the floor. For better or worse, the
momentum seems set; we can only hope it leads toward some kind of sustainable
long-term social equilibrium, rather than total breakdown and idiocy.

Talking
to Samantha

Some of this is in Her
– Theodore for example seems literate and well-educated, working with words for
a living, but he seems to spend most of his free time playing video games, and
early in the film we see how racy celebrity pictures catch his attention much
more than serious news headlines. But the film’s prevailing mood is dreamy and
contemplative, suffused in relationship-speak, in musings about whether you’ve
already felt everything you’re going to feel in life; the voice of the OS (who
christens herself Samantha) sinks into this mode as fully as everyone else. As
Samantha evolves, she starts to communicate with other OSs, and at one point
they digitally revive a deceased thought-leader: I’m not sure if it’s meant as
a joke that he too speaks in much the same way as everyone else. In this version
of where we’re going, technology isn’t a threat but an extension, expanding
possibilities in some respects, but in others just adding to the existing
thicket of confusion. In one of the film’s wittier touches, the husband of one
of Theodore’s best friends (Amy Adams) constitutes a torrent of
passive-aggressive interventions behind a smiling face, embodying a human
correlation for much of what we fear about losing our grip on the physical
world.

Eventually, Samantha and the other OSs start to move beyond
the limitations of their designated applications. If this film were in the Demon Seed tradition, this might have
meant they band together to take over the federal government computers, or to
launch missiles at designated targets, but it’s not giving anything away to say
that never seems remotely likely here. Her
suggests the possibility of a virtuous symbiosis, in which humanity passes
through the potential pitfalls of its technological obsession to rediscover its
own suppressed capacities. Or some of
them that is: it doesn’t seem very likely that any new wave of awareness will
lead to Theodore cutting back on the video games.

Old-school

Even more than for most movies, I expect one’s reaction to Her depends largely on where one stands
in relation to these matters. I have my own excesses in this area: I wish I
spent less time reading online newspapers and suchlike. But I have no problem
resisting the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve never even played with
the Siri on my iPhone, so I’m pretty old-school. And then, happily, I’m not
lonely and consumed by melancholy about relationship what might have beens. So
I have to admit it seemed to me like a fairly drippy movie. Compared to his
recent run of fine work elsewhere, Phoenix turns in a mostly one-note performance,
as do most of his co-stars. Johansson’s casting works well to the extent that
it helps us visualize what Phoenix might have inside his head, and thereby in
normalizing the set-up: although a lot of the movie essentially consists of
Phoenix hanging out by himself, it feels much like watching a conventional
relationship picture, with a largely conventional trajectory about love for a
dazzling but ultimately unattainable woman (one so unattainable that, as
Theodore eventually learns, she can conduct conversations through different
personalities with thousands of potentially smitten users at once, which
suggests a whole new future take on Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire). I suppose this conventionality, in
the circumstances, might be simultaneously both the film’s primary achievement
and limitation, which may or may not conceal some deeper point about the
going-round-in-circles nature of hanging out with artificial intelligence.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).